Informed Commenthttps://www.juancole.com
Thoughts on the Middle East, History and ReligionThu, 24 May 2018 09:16:36 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.5Khamenei, in reply to Trump, gives Europe 6-point Ultimatum on Nuclear Dealhttps://www.juancole.com/2018/05/khamenei-ultimatum-nuclear.html
https://www.juancole.com/2018/05/khamenei-ultimatum-nuclear.html#respondThu, 24 May 2018 09:16:36 +0000https://www.juancole.com/?p=175741Iran’s clerical Leader, Ali Khamenei, weighed in on Trump’s violation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) or Iran nuclear accord of 2015, which the US signed off on along with the rest of the UN Security Council and Germany (informally representing the European Union). Speaking frankly to Iran’s European trading partners, the ayatollah laid down six requirements for Iran to remain in the JCPOA itself. These demands appear to be a response to those made by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, whom Khamenei has dismissed as a mere “spy.”

Khamenei expressed his disappointment in Europe’s past and present behavior. He noted that some large European firms were already pulling out of Iran (this may be a reference to Total, SA). He said that on several occasions the US has violated its responsibilities under the JCPOA (referring to new economic sanctions slapped on Iran by Congress after it was signed with a promise of sanctions relief). He added that the Europeans had not so much as complained about these US violations. Then he set out his requirements.

1. The US has violated UNSC Resolution 2231 by revoking its signature. The European members of the Security Council (France and Britain), along with non-member Germany must introduce a resolution there condemning the US for this violation.

2. The 3 Western European Powers must stop pressuring Iran about its ballistic missile tests and its presence in the Middle East. Khamenei said that every time there is a meeting with them they bring up these two issues. (Neither was part of the JCPOA). He insists that they cease and desist. He said that Iran’s relationship with Middle Eastern countries is based on Islamic soft power and Iran’s strategic depth, and is key its ability to defend itself. It will not give up this element of its strategy.

3. Every time Trump announces a new boycott on Iran, Europe must explicitly reject it and stand against it.

4. If the US manages to damage Iran’s ability to export its petroleum (it is now exporting 2.5 mn barrels a day), Europe at Iran’s request must make up the shortfall. It may be, Khamenei said, that the Islamic Republic will view a reduction in its oil exports as a positive. If, however, the Iranian government decides it is being harmed by the US ability to strong-arm some of Iran’s customers into ceasing their imports of Iranian oil, Europe must agree to hold Iran harmless.

[The line about the benefits of any reduction in Iranian oil sales may reflect a conviction in some circles that it is never bad for an oil state to keep the oil in the ground, since its value will only increase in the future. This line of thinking does not reckon with the rise of electric vehicles, which may make petroleum worthless in 15 years or so.]

5. European banks must guarantee both governmental and private financial transactions (i.e. they must not yield to US blacklisting of Iranian banks. The US has just slapped sanctions on the Bank Melli, a major government institution, in an attempt to make it harder for Iran to buy and sell on the world market).

6. The Europeans must be prompt in responding to these requests.

If France, Germany and Britain will not undertake these guarantees, Iran reserves the right to start back up its enrichment activities, and would go back to enriching to 19.75%.

(That level of enrichment produces fuel useful in medical reactors and nuclear submarines; but Iran only has one of the former, and none presently of the latter, so enriching to that percentage is simply a form of deterrence, since obviously it is easier to enrich a stockpile of 19.75% to the 95% needed for a bomb than it is to start from scratch. – JC)

Khamenei underlined that since the US plans to make war on Iran via the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assent Control (OFAC), Iran would have to respond with its own economic and financial organs, as well as via the foreign ministry.

Khamenei was firm that Iran reserves the right to start back up its enrichment program if it concludes that the JCPOA is useless to it.

A set of ultimatums of this sort signals that Khamenei wants out of the JCPOA, since he surely knows that Europe is highly unlikely to acquiesce in his demands. He clearly has decided that Europe cannot be depended upon to buck Trump, and that its major corporations will most likely fold and pull up stakes from Iran. He may be underestimating the will of the French in particular to defy Trump, and Paris’s willingness to run interference for smaller French firms that do not have significant US business and who want to invest in Iran.

What the UNSC got from Iran in the JCPOA was pushing the timetable for any Iranian nuclear bomb, once Iran decided to create one, from three months out to a year or more. Khamenei’s response to Trump’s destruction of the JCPOA is to go back to the three-month timetable. It is a realistic and significant threat, which not only Europe but Israel and Saudi Arabia will take seriously. Europe in the end will shrug. Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and their bought man in the White House are more likely to respond with extensive covert action against Iran, in hopes of stirring up its ethnic minorities and restless working class.

The aggressive quartet, however, should be careful, since Iran is not helpless and can make trouble for them through covert operations as well.

Featured photo: KHAMENEI.IR/AFP/File / – Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, pictured in this handout photo from March 2018, said on May 23 that the United States does not honor its promises.

]]>https://www.juancole.com/2018/05/khamenei-ultimatum-nuclear.html/feed0Wrong: Netanyahu thinks Massive Israeli PR can cover up Occupation & end of Peace Processhttps://www.juancole.com/2018/05/massive-israeli-occupation.html
https://www.juancole.com/2018/05/massive-israeli-occupation.html#respondThu, 24 May 2018 07:33:24 +0000https://www.juancole.com/?p=175737Sidney (The Conversation) – The opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem last week represented a major PR coup for Israel, a move the country had sought for decades. It also came hot on the heels of another celebrated Israeli PR victory – the win by Israeli singer Netta Barzilai in the hugely popular Eurovision song contest.

The New York Times hailed Barzilai’s win as a “diplomatic victory and national vindication” for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his supporters. Netanyahu himself proudly declared Barzilai “the best ambassador of Israel”.

It was the bloodiest day in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in four years. And the international response was fierce. Senior UN officials condemned the violence as an “outrageous human rights violation”. Even Israeli medianoted it was Israel’s anti-Palestinian violence, not Netta Barzilai or the embassy move, dominating international headlines.

This international condemnation of Israeli violence flies in the face of what has been a concerted, long-term PR strategy by Israel to occlude its actions against the Palestinians and improve its image on the international stage. The well-funded “Brand Israel” campaign, launched in 2005, was intended to improve Israel’s soft power and show what makes the country attractive from a tourism, culture and foreign investment perspective. But as the recent backlash against Israel illustrates, it’s struggling to change opinions.

Musicians as soft power tools

Following the 2009 Gaza conflict, Israeli officials declared a plan to send novelists, art exhibitions and theatre productions overseas in order to “show Israel’s prettier face, so we are not thought of purely in the context of war,”
as Arye Mekel, the Foreign Ministry’s deputy director for cultural affairs, put it.

Israel also reportedly requires artists who receive state funding to sign a loyalty pledge “to promote the policy interests of the State of Israel via culture and art, including contributing to creating a positive image for Israel”.

On top of this, a series of PR manuals have been published by public relations specialists and pro-Israel supporters over the years, recommending that Israel continue to use “culture” (and other PR and marketing tools) to promote a positive image of the country. Some of these manuals have been authored or supported by right-wing American spin doctor and pollster Frank Luntz.

In the US, Luntz developed PR campaigns for Republican opponents of healthcare reform and was credited with convincing former President George W. Bush to stop using the term “global warming” in favor of “climate change”, because the latter term “sounds a more controllable and less emotional challenge”.

In the cultural sphere, Israeli government officials have heartily promoted big-name artists who have performed in Israel, such as Alicia Keys and Radiohead. Within days of Ringo Starr announcing a concert in Tel Aviv this June, international pro-Israel organisations were already celebrating a victory.

Israeli government supporters have even set up an entertainment executives lobby group – whose origins and motives have attracted controversy – to pressure artists to perform in Israel and disregard boycott calls.

Push-back from artists

Despite these efforts, a range of prominent musicians, actors and artists have decided against performing in Israel or visiting the country. According to the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions organisation, artists who have cancelled performances in Israel or declined to perform there include Elvis Costello, Lauryn Hill, U2, Bjork, Jean-Luc Godard, Snoop Dogg, Cat Power, and Vanessa Paradis, among others.

Then, in apparent response to Israel’s recent attacks on Gaza protesters, Israeli-American actress Natalie Portman refused to accept a prize a few weeks ago that was to be awarded to her by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. She said at the time she didn’t “want to appear as endorsing Benjamin Netanyahu” and “the mistreatment of those suffering from today’s atrocities is simply not in line with my Jewish values.” It was a remarkable development given Portman’s previously staunch pro-Israel positions.

Israel quickly deployed its PR efforts to carefully manage its response to the international condemnation.

However, research in international conflict resolution shows how stands by cultural figures like Lorde and Portman can make important contributions to reducing violence and driving peace efforts. Evidence from fields as diverse as terrorism studies, peace building, and international conflict resolution demonstrates that an imbalance of power and associated human rights abuses are major blocks to achieving peace through dialogue.

Israel clearly maintains a significant power imbalance over the Palestinians. By refusing invitations to Israel to be potential PR instruments, these artists are refusing to contribute to this power imbalance that is a such heavy obstacle to peace.

]]>https://www.juancole.com/2018/05/massive-israeli-occupation.html/feed0Saudis to let women drive but Jail a dozen Women’s Rights Activistshttps://www.juancole.com/2018/05/saudis-womens-activists.html
https://www.juancole.com/2018/05/saudis-womens-activists.html#respondThu, 24 May 2018 04:13:08 +0000https://www.juancole.com/?p=175729Dubai (AFP) – Saudi authorities have widened a crackdown on women’s rights advocates, detaining at least three more activists a month before the kingdom lifts its decades-old ban on women drivers, campaigners said Tuesday.

Saudi authorities on Saturday announced the arrest of seven people, mostly identified by rights groups as women who have long campaigned for the right to drive and to end the conservative Muslim state’s male guardianship system.

Amnesty International told AFP the number of detainees has risen to 10, including at least seven women, while the Gulf Centre for Human Rights and another Saudi activist said the number stood at 12.

“Despite international outcry and calls for the release of these activists, they still remain detained for their peaceful human rights work,” said Samah Hadid, Amnesty International’s Middle East director of campaigns.

“Saudi Arabian authorities cannot continue to publicly state they are dedicated to reform while treating women’s rights campaigners in this cruel way.”

The detainees include three generations of activists such as 28-year-old Loujain al-Hathloul — who was also held in 2014 for more than 70 days for attempting to drive from neighbouring United Arab Emirates to Saudi Arabia — and Aziza al-Yousef, a retired professor at Riyadh’s King Saud University.

Also arrested, campaigners say, was Madeha al-Ajroush, a psychotherapist in her 60s, well known for being part of a group that mounted the first Saudi protest movement in 1990 for the right to drive.

The Gulf Centre for Human Rights voiced concern that Hathloul, one of the most outspoken activists, was being held incommunicado, while other campaigners said the detainees were without any access to lawyers and their whereabouts were unknown.

Saudi government officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Without naming those detained, authorities have accused them of “suspicious contact with foreign parties”, providing financial support to enemies and attempting to undermine the kingdom’s “security and stability”.

State-backed media branded them traitors and “agents of embassies”.

– ‘No country for bold women’ –

The crackdown has cast a shadow on the kingdom’s much-publicised liberalisation drive launched by powerful Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who recently undertook a global tour aimed at reshaping his kingdom’s austere image.

The self-styled reformer has sought to break with long-held restrictions on women and the mixing of the genders, with the decades-old driving ban on women slated to end June 24.

“We continue to call for the immediate and unconditional release of all activists still being detained solely for their human rights work.”

In a scathing statement, the New York–based Committee to Protect Journalists demanded the release of detainee Eman al-Nafjan, a linguistics professor and mother-of-three who ran the popular “Saudiwoman” blog.

“Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman recently toured the West to project the image of a modernist and reformer,” CPJ deputy executive director Robert Mahoney said in the statement.

“But the moment he’s back home Saudi authorities revert to old habits — stifling dissent and detaining critical journalists. Writing about the place of women in Saudi society is not a crime.”

Those arrested had campaigned for the lifting of the driving ban and also against the guardianship system requiring women to obtain permission from their fathers, brothers, husbands or sons for a host of life decisions.

“The kingdom’s small community of liberal activists is reeling and struggling to make sense of the events,” the Washington-based Project on Middle East Democracy said in a report titled “Saudi Arabia: No country for bold women”.

“The arrest of so many well-known figures seems an ominous sign that the government is determined to wipe out what remains of Saudi civil society.”

Featured Photo: AFP/File / FAYEZ NURELDINE. Saudi women check out cars at an automotive exhibition for women in the Saudi capital Riyadh on May 13, 2018.

]]>https://www.juancole.com/2018/05/saudis-womens-activists.html/feed0Ethnic hostility is contagious: Czech-Slovak studyhttps://www.juancole.com/2018/05/ethnic-hostility-contagious.html
https://www.juancole.com/2018/05/ethnic-hostility-contagious.html#respondThu, 24 May 2018 04:04:25 +0000https://www.juancole.com/?p=175723Prague (AFP) – Hostility towards ethnic minorities is contagious and the acceptability of destructive behaviour towards them can easily change depending on how others behave, according to a new study by a Czech-Slovak team.

“Social norms regulating anti-social behaviour are very fragile if this behaviour is aimed at ethnic minorities,” researchers Michal Bauer and Julie Chytilova told AFP on Wednesday.

The study by the CERGE-EI Institute at Prague’s Charles University, the Munich-based Max Planck Institute and the Technical University in Kosice, Slovakia was conducted in eastern Slovakia, a district with a large Roma ethnic minority, in 2013.

Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA in April, the study was based on a game in which the players — 327 school children from the majority ethnic Slovak population aged 13-15 — first received two euros ($2.34) each.

Then they had to decide whether to pay 0.2 euros to reduce their rival’s funds by half — a “destructive” choice — or whether to keep the payoffs unchanged.

Next, in groups of three, they played against potential rivals represented by a list of 20 typical Slovak majority or Roma minority names, with all three players making their choice one after another.

“We tested the hypothesis that susceptibility to follow peers becomes magnified when harm is done to ethnic outgroup members compared with coethnics,” reads the study.

– ‘Fragile social norms’ –

The results were “striking” — the study pointed out a significant influence of peers in decision-making on doing harm to the minority.

If the first child to choose was “peaceful” towards the minority, only 19 percent of the second decision-makers were hostile.

But a total of 77 percent of second decision-makers showed hostility if the first child to choose had been hostile.

Among the third decision-makers, only 18 percent were destructive if one or both their predecessors were peaceful, but 88 percent were destructive if the previous two showed hostility.

Besides, “the participants saw hateful behaviour towards the Roma as more socially acceptable if somebody else treated the Roma with hate,” said Bauer and Chytilova.

Featured Photo: AFP/File / SAMUEL KUBANI. A study looking a Slovak majority and Roma minority names in Kosice, Slovakia, where a Roma community is seen in 2015, found “social norms regulating anti-social behaviour are very fragile if this behaviour is aimed at ethnic minorities.”

We write on behalf of the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) to express our dismay that the Israeli government has been involved in facilitating and directing abusive actions, including cyberbullying, against students at universities in the United States who have been active in campaigns for divestment from companies that profit from Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This constitutes unwarranted interference by a foreign power in these students’ free speech rights and threatens academic freedom at institutions of higher education in the United States.

MESA was founded in 1966 to promote scholarship and teaching on the Middle East and North Africa. The preeminent organization in the field, MESA publishes the International Journal of Middle East Studies and has nearly 2,500 members worldwide. MESA is committed to ensuring academic freedom of expression, both within the region and in connection with the study of the region in North America and elsewhere.

The most recent incident of which we are aware took place at George Washington University (GWU) in Washington, D.C. during April 2018. On 16 April 2018, a Student Senate vote on a resolution urging the university to divest from a number of companies (including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Elbit Systems, Caterpillar, CEMEX, General Electric, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and Motorola Solutions) was cancelled after students witnessed two unidentified individuals placing threatening posters around the university. The vote was rescheduled for 24 April 2018 and on that date the divestment resolution was approved by a vote of 18-6, with 6 abstentions.

Two men wearing bird costumes and masks, apparently evoking the Canary Mission website which features some two thousand derogatory and generally inaccurate and misleading profiles of students and faculty who have advocated for Palestinian rights, along with someone who appeared to be coordinating their activities, stood outside the room in which the Senate Senators were meeting to vote on the resolution. The clear intent was to intimidate the Senators as well as student supporters of the resolution. These individuals were later seen putting up posters around campus that read, “SJP [Students for Justice in Palestine], you saw two of us, we saw all of you.”

After the vote, administrators of the Act.il app, which media reports indicate your ministry was integrally involved in developing and promoting in order to combat the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, began directing its users to “like” and share a Facebook page set up to threaten and bully the GWU Student Senators who voted in support of the resolution. The Facebook page was taken down soon after the Senate vote, but Act.il did not remove its listing of the cyberbullying campaign as a “mission” to be conducted by anti-BDS activists until it expired.

We note in this connection that you personally promoted the launch of Act.il at the February 2017 Celebrate Israel Parade and that your ministry placed paid articles advertising the app in the Jerusalem Post and The Times of Israel (see The Forward).

Your status as an official of the Israeli government makes your involvement, and that of the ministry you head, in campaigns to try to intimidate American college and university students and to inhibit or suppress their freedom of expression especially egregious. These students have a right to be free of harassment, intimidation and cyberbullying by people who are in effect agents of the Israeli government. We therefore call on you and your ministry to cease promoting or supporting such campaigns of harassment, whether online or in person, and to refrain from interference of any kind when students and faculty in the United States exercise their constitutionally protected right of free speech and their academic freedom rights.

]]>https://www.juancole.com/2018/05/directly-involved-cyberbullying.html/feed0Palestine takes Israel to Int’l Criminal Court at Hague over Gaza Massacrehttps://www.juancole.com/2018/05/palestine-criminal-massacre.html
https://www.juancole.com/2018/05/palestine-criminal-massacre.html#respondWed, 23 May 2018 08:59:03 +0000https://www.juancole.com/?p=175708Palestine has submitted a formal referral to the International Criminal Court in the Hague over Israeli sniping with live fire at peaceful Gaza protesters this spring, which killed some 60 persons and literally wounded thousands.

Palestine, which is a cautious and timid government, had earlier declined to go to the ICC, in hopes instead of reaching a negotiated settlement. The Trump decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, however, forestalled a negotiated settlement on that issue. Israel’s illegal flooding of its citizens onto Palestinian property in the West Bank and refusal to negotiate any freeze in squatter settlements has also convinced Palestine that the US-Israeli “peace process” is a cover for slow genocide. Ironically, it was Trump’s lack of diplomatic grace that in large part impelled this step.

Palestine (or the Palestine Authority) was established in 1994 as a result of the Oslo peace accords signed by Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. It held elections in 1996 and 2006. The PA was recognized as having authority over Gaza and Areas A and B of the West Bank, and the Israelis had promised at Oslo in 1993 to turn over all of the West Bank and Gaza to Palestine by 1998. Instead, they flooded hundreds of thousands of Israeli squatters into the Palestinian West Bank and ultimately reneged entirely on their Oslo commitments. In 2013 the PA began styling itself the State of Palestine after UN recognition.

This spring, activists rallied near the fence erected by the Israelis to cage Palestinians into Gaza, but none of them appears actually to have crossed the fence into what Israel considers its territory (Israel and Palestine have no formal recognized borders with one another, only armistice lines that Israelis have seldom honored). Some 70 percent of Palestinians in Gaza were expelled in 1948 or 1967 from what is now Israel in a systematic Israeli campaign of ethnic cleansing, after which Jewish colonialists usurped Palestinian homes, land and other property and have kept their victims cooped up in Gaza ever since. Palestinians in refugee camps demanded to be allowed to return home.

Shooting down unarmed people on their own territory when they posed no immediate physical danger to any Israeli is a war crime in international law. In fact, a war crime pursued so systematically after a while becomes a crime against humanity.

The International Criminal Court began functioning in 2002, when the Rome Statute came into effect. The Statute is an international treaty now ratified by 123 countries, which attempts to strengthen the prosecution of war crimes where local courts cannot or will not do so.

So how could a Palestinian referral work? In the law, issues of standing and jurisdiction have to be settled before there is even a court case. The Israelis are denying that the ICC has jurisdiction and that the Palestinians have standing. They are wrong, and here is why.

In 2012, the United Nations General Assembly bestowed on Palestine (as created by virtue of the Oslo Accords, which Israel signed onto), recognition as a “non-member observer state.” This is the same status enjoyed by the Vatican. The vote made Palestine a UN observer and recognized it as a sovereign state.

That vote in turn gave Palestine the standing to join the International Criminal Court, which it did in 2015. Israel has refused to sign the ICC or recognize the body’s jurisdiction over Israeli territory.

So, Palestine is a member of the ICC and has been recognized as a state by the UNGA, and it certainly has standing to take this issue to the court.

How about jurisdiction? The Israelis are correct that the ICC does not have jurisdiction over crimes committed on Israeli territory, since Israel is not a signatory. The only way for the ICC to pursue a case in Israel proper would be for the United Nations Security Council to refer it to the court on the grounds that the issue was a threat to world order. The UNSC took this step with regard to Libya, and Moammar Gaddafi and his son Saif were found guilty at the court of crimes against humanity, which helped the Libyan people in their quest to overthrow the brutal and erratic regime.

The ICC does, however, have jurisdiction over war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Gaza and the West Bank. So the shooting dead of Palestinian protesters on Gaza soil by Israeli army snipers certainly would lie within its jurisdiction.

In short, Israel doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on here. In the past, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has threatened to simply destroy the ICC if it dares move against any Israeli official. Israel certainly has levers it can pull against the funding of the court and it can target individual justices in various ways (Netanyahu invented many techniques later made famous by Trump). Whether this simple bullying can succeed is unclear.

The ICC does not charge governments with crimes, only individuals. If specific Israeli army snipers can be identified who shot dead unarmed civilians in Gaza, they could be tried, even in absentia. Further, the Israeli chief of staff and the prime minister, who have vocally supported the Gaza massacre, could be charged, as the responsible authorities. If they were convicted, they would experience difficulty traveling internationally, though obviously it would be difficult for the court itself to have them arrested. Their political enemies in Israel would certainly be emboldened against them, however.

In the past, the Israelis have also threatened tit for tat, saying that if Palestine brought charges against Israeli officials of war crimes, Israel would initiate similar charges against old PLO guerrillas guilty of past attacks on civilians.

This threat could be carried out by Israeli courts, but, ironically enough, not at the ICC. Since Israel is not a signatory it cannot refer cases. And, if the attacks occurred in Israel proper, the ICC would not have jurisdiction over them. Moreover, by now few State of Palestine officials could be so charged.

The really huge implication of these developments, however, had to do not with the Gaza Massacre of 2018, but with Israeli squatter settlements on the West Bank. They constitute a violation of the Geneva Accords of 1949 on the treatment of populations in militarily occupied territories, and are so arranged as to fall under the crime of Apartheid as defined in the Rome Statute. If the ICC takes up that issue, it could reach decisions with far-reaching implications for Israeli policy. Again, even if the decision would be difficult to implement, it would certainly result in growing sanctions on Israel internationally.

]]>https://www.juancole.com/2018/05/palestine-criminal-massacre.html/feed0Will biggest victim of Trump Golden Shower Diplomacy be global Rule of Law?https://www.juancole.com/2018/05/biggest-victim-diplomacy.html
https://www.juancole.com/2018/05/biggest-victim-diplomacy.html#respondWed, 23 May 2018 07:22:25 +0000https://www.juancole.com/?p=175704Madison, Wi. ( Tomdispatch.com) – Month by month, tweet by tweet, the events of the past two years have made it clearer than ever that Washington’s once-formidable global might is indeed fading. As the American empire unravels with previously unimagined speed, there are many across this country’s political spectrum who will not mourn its passing. Both peace activists and military veterans have grown tired of the country’s endless wars. Trade unionists and business owners have come to rue the job losses that accompanied Washington’s free-trade policies. Anti-globalization protesters and pro-Trump populists alike cheered the president’s cancellation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The idea of focusing on America and rebuilding the country’s tattered infrastructure has a growing bipartisan appeal.

But before we join this potential chorus of “good riddance” to U.S. global power, it might be worth pausing briefly to ask whether the acceleration of the American decline by President Trump’s erratic foreign policy might not come with unanticipated and unpleasant costs. As Americans mobilize for the 2018 midterms and the 2020 presidential contest, they might look beyond Washington’s mesmerizing celebrity scandals and consider instead the hidden consequences of the country’s ongoing withdrawal from the global arena. Indeed, this fitful, uncontrolled retreat carries with it such serious risks that it might be time for ordinary voters and political activists alike to put foreign policy, in the broadest sense, at the top of their electoral watch list.

First, let’s just admit the obvious. After 18 months in office, Trump’s one-man style of diplomacy, though potentially capable of a few “wins,” is clearly degrading American global stature. After surveying 134 countries, Gallup’s pollsters recently reported that worldwide approval of U.S. leadership has plunged from 48% in 2016 to a record low of 30%, a notch below China’s 31% and significantly under Germany’s 41%.

As Trump has abrogated one international accord after another, observers worldwide have struggled to find some rationale for decisions that seem questionable on their merits and have frayed relations with long-standing allies. Given his inordinate obsession with the “legacy” of Barack Obama, epitomized in a report, whether true or not, of his ritual “defiling” of his predecessor’s Moscow hotel bed via the “golden showers” of Russian prostitutes, there’s a curious yet coherent logic to his foreign policy. You might even think of it as Golden Shower diplomacy. Whatever Obama did, Trump seems determined to undo with a visceral vehemence: the Trans-Pacific trade pact (torn up), the Paris climate accord (withdrawn), the Iran nuclear freeze (voided), close relations with NATO allies (damaged), diplomatic relations with Cuba (frozen), Middle Eastern military withdrawal (reversed), ending the Afghan war (cancelled), the diplomatic pivot to Asia (forgotten), and so on into what already seems like an eternity.

As bizarre as all this might be, Trump’s four to eight years presiding over what still passes for U.S. foreign policy through such personal pique will have lasting consequences. The American presence on the global stage will be further reduced, potentially opening the way for the rise of those autocratic powers, Beijing and Moscow, hostile to the liberal international order that Washington promoted for the past 70 years, even as — thanks to Trump’s love of fossil fuels — the further degradation of the planetary environment occurs.

The Delicate Duality of American Global Power

To fully understand what’s at stake, you would need to reach back to the dawn of U.S. global dominion and try to grasp the elusive character of the power that went with it. In the closing months of World War II, when the United States stood astride a partially wrecked planet like a titan, Washington used its extraordinary clout to build a new world order grounded in a “delicate duality” that juxtaposed two contradictory attributes. It fostered an international community of sovereign nations governed by the rule of law, while also building its own superpower dominion through the raw Realpolitikof economic pressure, crushing military force, unrestrained covert action, and diplomatic leverage.

Keep in mind that America had emerged from the ashes of that world war as a behemoth of unprecedented power. With Europe, Japan, and Russia in ruins, the U.S. had the only intact industrial complex left and then accounted for about half of the world’s entire economic output. At war’s end, its military had swelled to more than 12 million troops, its Navy ruled the seas with more than 1,000 warships, and its air force commanded the skies with 41,000 combat aircraft. In the decade that followed, Washington would encircle Eurasia with hundreds of military bases, as well as bevies of strategic bombers and warships. In the process, it would also confine its Cold War enemies, China and Russia, behind that infamous Iron Curtain.

Throughout those early Cold War years, Washington’s diplomats walked tall in the corridors of power, deftly negotiating defense pacts and trade deals that gave the country a distinct advantage on the world stage. Meanwhile, its clandestine operatives maneuvered relentlessly in the shadow lands of global power to topple neutral or hostile governments via coups and covert operations. Washington, of course, eventually won the Cold War, but its tactics produced almost unimaginably dreadful costs — brutal military dictatorships across Asia and Latin America, millions of dead in Indochina, and devastated societies in Central Asia, Central America, and southern Africa.

Simultaneously, however, the U.S. victory in World War II also brought a surge of citizen idealism as millions of American veterans returned home, hopeful that their sacrifice had not only defeated fascism but also won a more peaceful world. To ensure that the ravaged planet would never again experience such global death and destruction, American diplomats also began working with their allies to build, step by step, nothing less than a novel architecture for global governance, grounded in the rule of international law.

At the Bretton Woods resort in New Hampshire in 1944, Washington convened 44 nations, large and small, to design a comprehensive economic regime for a prosperous post-war world. In the process, they formed the International Monetary Fund, or IMF (for financial stability); the World Bank (for postwar reconstruction); and, somewhat later, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (for free trade), the predecessor of the World Trade Organization.

A year after that, in San Francisco, Washington led 850 delegates from 50 allied nations in drafting the charter for a new organization, the United Nations, that aspired to a world order marked by inviolable sovereignty, avoidance of armed conflict, human rights, and shared prosperity. In addition to providing crisis management through peacekeeping and refugee relief, the U.N. also helped order a globalizing world by creating, over the next quarter century, 17 specialized organizations responsible for everything from food security (the Food and Agriculture Organization, or FAO) to public health (the World Health Organization, or WHO).

Starting with the $13 billion Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of war-torn Europe, Washington also supplemented the U.N.’s work by providing billions of dollars in bilateral aid to fund reconstruction and economic development in nations old and new. President John F. Kennedy globalized that effort by establishing the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) that today has a budget of $27 billion and 4,000 employees who deliver humanitarian assistance worldwide by providing, for instance, $44 million in emergency relief for 700,000 Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.

Washington was careful to weave this new world order into the web of international law it had been building assiduously since its debut on the world stage at the Second Hague Conference on peace in 1907. Under the U.N. charter of 1945, the General Assembly convened the International Court of Justice, which took its seat at the grandiose Peace Palace in The Hague built by steel baron Andrew Carnegie years before to promote the international rule of law.

Just months after its founding, the U.N. also formed its Human Rights Commission, chaired by former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, to draft the landmark Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in Paris on December 10, 1948. In addition, instead of firing squads for the defeated Axis leaders, the U.S. led the Allies in convening tribunals at Nuremburg and Tokyo in 1945-1946 that tried their war crimes under international law. Three years later, Washington joined the international community in adopting the four modern Geneva conventions that laid down the laws of war for future conflicts to protect both captives and civilians.

During the 70 years that Washington led many of these international institutions, half the world won national independence, economic prosperity spread, poverty declined, hunger receded, diseases were defeated, world war was indeed avoided, and human rights advanced. No other empire in world history had presided over so much progress and prosperity for such a significant share of humanity.

Citizen Diplomats

Some scholars of international relations remain confident that the international institutions America has long promoted can survive its demise as the globe’s dominant power. But Trump’s control over foreign policy and his erratic leadership make that prospect at best uncertain. While scholars place their hopes on the internal resilience of the liberal world order, an equally important source for its potential survival lies with the millions of U.S. citizen-diplomats who have served, for the past 70 years, as adjuncts in its promotion and remain, as activists and voters, potential advocates for its preservation — and these even include one group that might normally be considered unlikely indeed: the very evangelicals who, in recent times, have backed Donald Trump in startling numbers.

Unlike the genteel elite exchanges and government programs that marked Europe’s old empires, America has influenced billions of people worldwide pervasively through mass communications and directly through citizen initiatives. While in Britain’s imperial heyday, elite circles communicated with each other via telegraph, newspaper, and radio, America has freed the flow of information for uncounted billions through television, the Internet, and cell phones — making grassroots activism a global reality and citizen diplomacy a major force in a changing world.

Although much less visible than those cellular towers lining rural roads and the computer screens dotting desktops in every city, the global impact of U.S. citizen initiatives has been no less profound. Despite a foreign policy that frequently retreated into isolationism or hyper-nationalism or brutal wars, since the end of World War II a surprising number of Americans have immersed themselves in the wider world, arguably far more deeply than any other people on the planet. The old European colonial empires were state enterprises, but the U.S. imperium has been, in significant ways, a people’s project (as well, of course, in Washington’s coups and wars, as an anti-people’s project).

If Europe’s missionary efforts were generally state-sponsored, the spirit has moved millions of individual American evangelicals to “go on mission,” often to the most remote, rugged parts of the planet. From the Civil War to World War II, mainline Protestant denominations sponsored small numbers of career missionaries who made the conversion of China the aspiration of the post-Civil War generation. But since the Boeing Corporation introduced cheap jet travel in the 1960s, countless millions of evangelicals have launched themselves on short-term missions. While religious conversion has certainly been their prime goal, providing medicine, food, and education to remote areas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America has also been a key part of that endeavor.

As a way to count these countless evangels, in my own small family circle a cousin, a Harvard-trained pediatrician, has made several medical missions to West Africa; the real-estate agent for my mother’s house repeatedly slowed the sale by going on education missions to Cambodia; friends from my Anglican parish travel regularly to Haiti on a development mission to a sister church; and my father-in-law’s old army buddy for years flew his private plane down to Central America on gospel missions.

Whenever global disasters strike, the Mormons, along with the 5,000 employees of Catholic Relief and 46,000 workers of the Protestant World Vision, mobilize what has become billions of dollars annually to send massive shipments of relief goods to the farthest corners of the Earth.

America’s concern for the world beyond its borders also has a no-less-vital secular side. Paralleling the rise of Washington as a world power, the Chicago-based Rotary International, for instance, has grown into a global network of 33,000 clubs in 200 countries. Since 1985, its 1.2 million members have donated nearly two billion dollars to inoculate two billion children worldwide against polio. As someone who still limps from this childhood disease, I was delighted to learn a few years ago, when I spoke before my local Rotary Club in Madison, Wisconsin, that my speaker’s fee had been automatically donated to the worldwide fight against polio.

When I spoke to the local Kiwanis chapter, I found that they were crisscrossing the state collecting antique foot-pedal Singer sewing machines for shipment to rural co-ops in Central America without electricity — catalyzing this small city’s Sewing Machine Project that has sent 2,500 machines worldwide since 2005. In a similar fashion, recent immigrants to the U.S. have often sponsored schools and medical care in their former homelands; military veterans have promoted humanitarian efforts in old battlegrounds like Vietnam; the 230,000 returned Peace Corps volunteers have been voices for a people-oriented foreign policy; and the list only goes on.

Whether passing the plate down the pews or logging onto the Internet, millions of Americans send billions of dollars overseas every year through their churches or activist groups like Doctors Without Borders, CARE USA, and Save the Children USA, whether for the Ethiopian famine, Indonesia’s tsunami, or the Rohingya crisis.

This tradition of what might be thought of as citizen diplomacy and the ingrained internationalism that goes with it were manifest in the extraordinary eruption of mass protest that occurred when, in his first week in office, President Trump tried to ban travellers from seven Muslim-majority nations. Within a day, a small crowd of 30 people with placards at JFK international airport in New York swelled into impassioned protests by thousands attending demonstrations across the city. Over the next week, there would be parallel protests by tens of thousands in some 30 cities nationwide, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Portland, Maine. It is these ardent demonstrators and the millions more with their own international causes who seem mindful of what might be lost as America heads for the exits from the world stage.

China Rising

Yes, CIA coups, the Vietnam War, and untold other horrors of empire will long remain troubling memories of U.S. hegemony, not to speak of the twenty-first-century war on terror, those CIA black sites, drone strikes, and so on, so why should anyone, liberal or conservative, who harbors doubts about America’s global power be concerned with its accelerating decline? At its core, the U.S. world order has rested, for the past 70 years, on that delicate duality — an idealistic community of sovereign nations and sovereign citizens equal under the rule of international law joined tensely, even tenuously, to an American imperium grounded in the grimmest aspects of U.S. military and economic power.

Now, consider the likely alternatives if Donald Trump succeeds in withdrawing the U.S. from any form of idealistic internationalism. While the downside of Washington’s harsh hegemony of the last almost three-quarters of a century was in some part balanced by its promotion of a liberal international order, both Beijing and Moscow seem inclined to the idea of hegemony without that international community and its rule of law. Beijing accepts the U.N. (where it has a seat on the Security Council) and the World Trade Organization (a convenient wedge into world markets), but it simply ignores inconvenient aspects of the international community like the Permanent Court of Arbitration, recently dismissing an adverse decision there over its claims to the South China Sea.

Beijing has quietly challenged what it views as pro-Western organizations by beginning to build its own parallel world order, which it naturally intends to dominate: the Shanghai Cooperation Organization instead of NATO, its Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in lieu of the IMF, and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership to supplant the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact. The trillions of dollars in trade and development agreements that Beijing has doled out across Asia, Africa, and Latin America in recent years are the epitome of commercial Realpolitik, devoid of any concern for the environment or for workers’ rights. Putin’s Russia is even more dismissive of the restraints of international law, expropriating sovereign territory, invading neighboring nations, assassinating domestic enemies abroad, and blatantly manipulating elections overseas (a subject in which, of course, the United States once showed a certain expertise).

Although overshadowed in recent years by its endless counterterror operations and its devastatingly destructive wars across the Greater Middle East and Africa, the United States has nonetheless had a profound and often positive impact upon the world, in terms both of its high politics and its mass culture. Long after the damaging excesses of Washington’s hegemonic power — the CIA coups, the torture, the drone killings, and those never-ending wars — fade from memory, the world will still need the more benign dimension of its dominion, particularly the very idea of global governance through international organizations and the rule of law, especially as we face a planet similarly in decline. The loss of all of that would be a loss indeed.

If the world experiences a slow, relatively peaceful transition away from U.S. hegemony, then the subsequent global order just might maintain some of the liberal international institutions that still represent the best of American values. If, by contrast, the golden-shower diplomacy of Donald Trump continues, while the Chinese and Russian versions of hegemony only gain strength, then we will likely witness a harsher world order based on autocracy, Realpolitik, and commercial domination, with scant attention to human rights, women’s rights, or the rule of law. At this critical turning point in world history, the choice is still, to a surprising degree, ours to make. But not for long.

]]>https://www.juancole.com/2018/05/biggest-victim-diplomacy.html/feed0Why Pompeo’s Iran speech was So Outrageoushttps://www.juancole.com/2018/05/pompeos-speech-outrageous.html
https://www.juancole.com/2018/05/pompeos-speech-outrageous.html#respondWed, 23 May 2018 04:14:11 +0000https://www.juancole.com/?p=175700Oxford (The Transnational) – Speaking at the Heritage Foundation…, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo practically declared war on Iran. His unprecedented threats against Iran went even beyond what President Trump had said in the past.

Commenting on the speech (full transcript here), JStreet wrote: “With their decision to violate the historic JCPOA arms control agreement, the president and his ‘war cabinet’ have created a strategic disaster of their own making and undone the major accomplishments of the previous administration. They have made the US, Israel and the world less safe.”

Short history of Iran’s nuclear activities: 1957 to the JCPOA

After 12 years of intensive talks, initially between Britain, France and Germany (the EU-3), and finally between Iran and the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany (P5+1), Iran and the leading world powers reached a landmark agreement. The nuclear deal (officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA) was the result of the efforts of the greatest experts in nuclear non-proliferation, including experts from the IAEA and departments of energy and intelligence service of all those countries.

Iran’s nuclear programme had started in 1957 with the help of the United States as a part of the Atoms for Peace program, when a “proposed agreement for cooperation in research in the peaceful uses of atomic energy” was announced.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Mohammad Reza Shah’s government started an ambitious nuclear program. It established the Tehran Nuclear Research Centre in 1967, with a US-supplied 5-megawatt nuclear research reactor, which was fueled by highly enriched uranium.

Iran was one of the first countries to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1968. The NPT allows all member states to engage in peaceful nuclear activity, including full range of processing, so long as they refrain from manufacturing nuclear weapons.

In return, the five recognized nuclear states (the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France) promised to move towards the elimination of their nuclear weapons in “good faith”. Not only have they not fulfilled this requirement, on the contrary, they have continued to develop more and more deadly and sophisticated nuclear weapons, and they have also been joined by India, Pakistan, Israel and recently by North Korea.

In 1974, with US backing, the Shah approved plans to construct up to 23 nuclear power stations, producing 23,000 megawatts of electricity. US and European companies competed against each other to help build those reactors.

In 1975, the Erlangen/Frankfurt firm signed a contract worth up to $6 billion to build the first nuclear power station in Bushehr. President Ford signed a directive in 1976 offering Iran the chance to buy and operate US built power stations, including a U.S.-built reprocessing facility for extracting plutonium from nuclear reactor fuel.

After the Islamic Revolution, all those programmes were suspended, including the Bushehr power station that was nearly complete.

The start of the eight-year long Iran-Iraq war further delayed the resumption of the nuclear program. Eventually, in 1981 during the presidency of the late Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, Iranian officials decided that the country’s nuclear development should continue.

They turned to the Western countries that had promised to build reactors in Iran to resume their work, but all of them refused to cooperate.

In 1983, IAEA officials were keen to assist Iran in various aspects of reactor fuel fabrication, chemical engineering and design aspects of pilot plants for uranium conversion, corrosion of nuclear materials, LWR fuel fabrication, and pilot plant development for production of nuclear grade UO2. However, contrary to NPT regulations, the United States directly intervened to discourage IAEA assistance to Iran.

Finally, Iran turned to China, but under US pressure China too dropped her nuclear commerce with Iran.

However, Iran was successful to persuade Russia to complete the Bushehr reactor, which was completed after long delay and at great cost to Iran. Faced with this situation, Iran decided to conduct her own work on nuclear enrichment, in which she succeeded.

The United States imposed unilateral sanctions on Iran and forced other countries to follow suit. Iran was taken to the Security Council, which also imposed crippling sanctions that cut Iran’s oil exports by half and cost Iran billions of dollars in lost revenue.

Iran continued with her nuclear programme and increased the number of her centrifuges, despite threats of war, crippling sanctions, cyber sabotage, the assassination of her nuclear scientists by Israeli agents, etc.

It was only after President Barack Obama agreed that as a member of the NPT Iran was entitled to a peaceful nuclear programme that intense negotiations started, resulting in the JCPOA.

While establishing her right to engage in nuclear activity, Iran accepted the harshest conditions as confidence-building measures. The agreement reduced Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile by 98 percent and restricted the level of enrichment to 3.67 percent.

Given that an enrichment level of more than 90 percent is needed to build a nuclear bomb, the deal makes it impossible for Iran’s uranium to be weaponized.

Under the deal, Iran also reduced the number of its centrifuges from 20,000 to a little over 5,000, far below the number that would be needed for manufacturing a single bomb, even if she wanted to do so. Iran closed the Arak reactor, which was capable of producing plutonium, and agreed to severe restrictions on research and development activities in other facilities.

In short, the agreement made it virtually impossible for Iran to build a single bomb.

Some of Pompeo’s intolerable conditions

1) Pompeo demands that: “First, Iran must declare to the IAEA full account of prior military dimension of its nuclear programme, and permanently and verifiably abandon such work in perpetuity”.

This is something that was pursued under PMU or Possible Military Use during the talks. The IAEA studied all those allegations, including taking soil samples from Parchin military base where the Israelis had claimed that nuclear activity had been conducted. The IAEA decided that there had been “no diversion” of nuclear material for military use.

Iran has agreed to abandon work on nuclear weapons in perpetuity, and all the talk about so-called “sunset clauses” is baseless. In addition to being a member of the NPT, Iran has also joined the “Additional Protocol”, which requires continuous, unannounced inspections of all her nuclear sites, and she has also given an undertaking never to produce nuclear weapons.

The prohibitions do not stop at the end of the “sunset clauses”, but will continue in perpetuity.

The IAEA that is the only legal body in charge of monitoring the deal has, on eleven separate occasions, certified that Iran has fully complied with the terms of the deal.

2) “Second, Iran must stop enrichment and never pursue plutonium reprocessing. This includes closing its heavy water reactor.”

Demanding that Iran should stop enrichment goes against NPT rules. As for “never pursuing plutonium reprocessing”, this is precisely what Iran has agreed to do under the JCPOA, and has destroyed her heavy water reactor.

3) “Third, Iran must also provide to the IAEA full unqualified access to all sites throughout the entire country.”

This is again another provision of the JCPOA, which the IAEA has used on many occasions.

4) “Iran must end its proliferation of ballistic missiles and halt the launching or development of nuclear-capable missiles.”

This is yet another misleading and illegal demand. Like any other country, Iran has the right to defend herself (UN Chater Art 51) and as she is unable to acquire advanced military equipment that the United States has readily sold to all Iranian neighbours, Iran’s missiles are her only means of deterring a military aggression.

Iran does not have intercontinental ballistic missiles as she has limited the range of her missiles to 2,000 kilometres. They are not designed to carry nuclear weapons, and in any case Iran does not have nuclear warheads.

Iran has been fighting against ISIS and other terrorists in Iraq and Syria at the invitation of the governments of those countries. It is up to the Syrian government to ask Iran to withdraw her forces from that country, not for a US Secretary of State to dictate to other countries what they should and should not do.

All experts agree that the mantra of “Iran-backed Houthis” is exaggerated propaganda, as Iran’s contacts with the Houthis and influence over them is minimal.

It is Saudi Arabia and members of her coalition who, with American support, have been bombing Yemen, killing and wounding tens of thousands of innocent people and creating the world’s greatest humanitarian catastrophe there.

What this is really about: Obsession with revenge and regime change

President Trump and his three senior officials, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton and Rudy Giuliani, seem to be preparing the ground for a disastrous war with Iran.

Their hostility towards Iran does not seem to have anything to do with Iran’s nuclear programme, but has everything to do with an obsession for regime change.

Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum, Mike Pompeo boasted that “one of the first things the President did is to go build a coalition of [Persian] Gulf states and Israel to help find a platform which could uniformly push back against Iranian expansionism.”(1)

When he was still a member of Congress in 2016, Pompeo called for action to “change Iranian behaviour, and, ultimately, Iranian regime.” (2)

In the past, he has called for strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.(3)

Some of his hostility towards Iran seems to have been based on his hatred of Islam. In 2015, Pompeo, then a Congressman, attacked Barack Obama, who, according to him, took the side of the “Islamic East” in its conflict with the “Christian West”. “Every time there has been a conflict between the Christian West and the Islamic East, the data points all point to a single direction,” he said.

Some of his hostility towards Iran seems to have been based on his hatred of Islam. In 2015, Pompeo, then a Congressman, attacked Barack Obama, who, according to him, took the side of the “Islamic East” in its conflict with the “Christian West”. “Every time there has been a conflict between the Christian West and the Islamic East, the data points all point to a single direction,” he said. (4)

John Bolton is another strong advocate of regime change in Iran.

In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal on 15 January 2018, entitled “Beyond the Iran Nuclear Deal: US policy should be to end the Islamic Republic before its 40th anniversary”, Bolton condemned the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran as a “massive strategic blunder.”

However, he went on to say that American policy, “should be ending Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution before its fortieth anniversary.”

He continued: “Recognizing a new Iranian regime in 2019 would reverse the shame of once seeing our diplomats held hostage for four hundred and forty-four days. The former hostages can cut the ribbon to open the new U.S. Embassy in Tehran.” (5)

The former Mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, who is now a member of Trump’s legal team has also been a fervent advocate of regime change in Iran.

Speaking at a conference of the terrorist, cultish group, the Mojahedin-e Khalq Organisation, in Washington on 5 May 2018, Rudy Giuliani openly said that Washington’s policy was regime change in Iran, and he even promised that next year they would celebrate the event in Tehran. (6)

This obsession with the past and a deliberate decision to bring about a regime change in Iran will have incalculable costs.

Let’s not forget that prior to Iraq war, Paul Wolfowitz, one of the authors of that war, predicted that it would be a “cake walk”, that it “would pay for itself”, and that “US forces would be welcomed with roses”.

Fifteen years after that disastrous war, American forces are still operating in that country, and the war which has cost trillions of dollars to US taxpayers has killed and wounded millions of innocent Iraqi people, shattered that country and has given rise to a number of vicious terrorist movements.

It should be clear to everyone who is familiar with the Middle East that a war against Iran will not be like Iraq, it will be much worse. It will kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people, will set the Middle East on fire and will do a great damage to Israel and other US allies that she seemingly wishes to support.

During his confirmation hearing at the US Senate, Mike Pompeo was asked if Russia was a unique country. He replied: “This [US] is a unique, exceptional country. Russia is unique, but not exceptional.” (7)

This kind of aggressive, bullying, threatening, demanding and illegal language has not been heard from a responsible government official since before the Second World War.

The concept of Americans being unique and exceptional and almost chosen by God, and referring to other nations as inferior, in the way that President Trump referred to the Latinos as animals, is not far removed from the concept of a superior race and Der Untermensch, or subhuman people.

If we wish to avoid the horrors of the Second World, we must put an end to this kind of arrogant mentality.

It is time for the Europeans, for all the peace-loving Americans and for millions of concerned people across the world who will be paying the cost of this misadventure to stop this madness before it is too late.

]]>https://www.juancole.com/2018/05/pompeos-speech-outrageous.html/feed0In growing Constitutional Crisis, Trump attacks CIA, FBI over Investigationshttps://www.juancole.com/2018/05/growing-constitutional-investigations.html
https://www.juancole.com/2018/05/growing-constitutional-investigations.html#respondWed, 23 May 2018 04:07:19 +0000https://www.juancole.com/?p=175695Washington (AFP) – President Donald Trump attacked the probe into possible collusion between his campaign and Russia as a “political hit job” on Monday, as a part of a mounting White House effort to paint the probe as politically motivated.

In the latest salvo from Trump’s administration and his Republican Party, the president assailed former CIA chief John Brennan, a strident critic, as having initiated the investigation.

A day earlier, Trump demanded the Justice Department investigate the FBI for allegedly planting an informant in his campaign, and his lawyer pressed Special Counsel Robert Mueller to speed up the probe to avoid it affecting November’s mid-term elections.

Both moves highlighted the heightened political stakes surrounding the year-old probe, as Mueller seeks to interview Trump himself amid growing chances of an impeachment effort against the president if evidence of collusion and obstruction of justice is found.

“This was a Political hit job, this was not an Intelligence Investigation,” Trump said in a series of tweets, quoting Fox News commentator Dan Bongino.

Brennan, the CIA’s head from 2013 to 2017, “started this entire debacle about President Trump,” the president said. “He has disgraced himself, he has disgraced the Country, he has disgraced the entire Intelligence Community.”

– FBI infiltrated Trump campaign? –

GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP / CHIP SOMODEVILLA. US Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein promises to investigate whether there was any politically motivated surveillance of the Trump campaign.

In recent weeks, Trump has stepped up his attacks on the Russia investigation, aiming to erode trust in Mueller’s integrity in the event the probe takes aim at the president himself.

After hitting the one-year mark last week, Mueller’s probe has taken on increasing political weight as the country heads towards midterm elections.

Investigators have already issued 22 indictments, including of top Trump aides like chairman Paul Manafort and former national security advisor Michael Flynn.

More indictments are expected, but Mueller and his team have remained absolutely silent about the direction of the investigation and what evidence they have, especially with regard to Trump.

Aiming to exploit that silence, Trump took to Twitter on Sunday to order the Justice Department to investigate the FBI’s implanting of “at least one” informant in his 2016 campaign, suggesting it was an act of political espionage by president Barack Obama’s administration.

Late last week, some US media identified a British-based American academic and former government official, with longstanding ties to the CIA, as the informant who sought meetings with several Trump aides during the campaign at the FBI’s request.

Based on the meeting, the Justice Department will include in its ongoing investigation into the 2016 election “any irregularities with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s or the Department of Justice’s tactics concerning the Trump Campaign,” according to the White House.

Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani added pressure on the probe, telling media Mueller hopes to wrap up by September 1 — a target date that no one on Mueller’s team has made public.

Vice President Mike Pence reiterated that stance, telling Fox News: “I think it’s time that the special counsel wrap it up.”

The White House is gambling that by both pressuring and denigrating the investigation, Republicans can gain voter support ahead of the November elections.

If Mueller finds evidence of criminal behavior by Trump, it is crucial the Republicans prevent Democrats from gaining control of the House of Representatives, which would rule on any impeachment motion.

Analysts say Trump’s strategy to attack the CIA and FBI could be working.

“The FBI and DOJ are reluctant to publicly respond in any way that makes them appear political,” said Julian Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University.

“By tweeting the accusation, the president has already cast the doubt in the public mind.”

Feature photo. AFP / SAUL LOEB. US President Donald Trump accused former CIA director John Brennan of launching the Russia meddling probe of his campaign as a “political hit job”.